Computer security is a near constant battle between corporate experts, computer-science professors, and “white hat” hackers looking for loopholes that range from the difficult to execute to the scarily easy. But none are quite as bizarre, or impressive, as this one.
Mordechai Guri of Ben Gurion University has the hacker version of a locked-room mystery. How do you breach a computer that isn’t connected to the internet, and doesn’t even have speakers or a fan? The answer, Guri figured out, lies in the computer’s hard drive. Hard drives are a bit like record players: They have a motorized arm that jumps around the drive reading and recording data. The noises you hear when you start a desktop are a hard drive’s arm moving around and accessing data.
And those noises are the key. By uploading malware to the computer, a spy could have the hard drive scratch out in movements, say, the encryption key to sensitive data, and have a smartphone listen in. Then said spy could easily breach the computer and steal the data.
Of course, this has a few hard limits at the moment. To listen in, a smartphone has to be 6 feet or closer; you have to get the malware onto the computer in the first place, which is no mean feat in itself; and it won’t work on computers that use flash memory, which has no moving parts. But nonetheless, you can likely expect to see this gag in every spy movie going forward, and it’s a useful reminder that no computer is completely secure.
(Via Gizmodo)
